THE SPEAKER

The Speaker is the result of an ongoing investigation on the life and work of Fidel Castro as a leader of the Cuban Revolution. This work, video-sound and performance piece, focuses on the voice, the speech act and the relation between the speaker and the spectators. In the video, image and sound are separated in order to study clearly the gestural movements of the orator; it is an attempt at concentrating solely on the voice as discourse. The image devoid of sound shows its purely visual characteristics that go beyond the dependency on the audible; emphasizing the unity of the image in itself. The voice or voices become audible in the absence of the image, wherefrom the voice reveals itself as being beyond discourse, that is to say, voice as revelation. The performative is evident in both image and sound, but it is extrapolated into the plane of the here-and-now where the voice becomes multiplied by various performers in the “audience”, who recite the selected excerpts from Fidel’s speeches.